What Business Can Do for Education

Go read this article from Rick Hess right now!.

Hess is looking at what business can do for eduction and after an englightening trip through what some of the top business leaders in America have said, Hess gives us some suggetsions. Of primary usefulness is lending expertise in data management, technology, performance evaulation and human resources management.

These are wonderful suggestions, but Hess quotes Bill Gates in from a speech gave in 2005:

For example, in a February 2005 speech to the nation’s governors, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, offered a formulation that could serve as the mission statement for business leaders seeking to improve America’s schools. “America’s high schools,” he said, “are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean…broken, flawed, and underfunded—though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools—even when they’re working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today…. Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship…. This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.”

Gates and other business leaders interested in education, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have routinely pointed out that despite a national economy that has changed dramatically in teh past 30 years, our schooling system has remained largely unchanged. Quoting a Chamber of Commerce report, Hess writes:

Throughout that period, education spending has steadily increased and rafts of well-intentioned school reforms have come and gone. But student achievement has remained stagnant, and our K–12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged—preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant.”

They are exactly right.

The problem however is not a lack of ideas to reform education's practices, there are plenty. What is missing is the will. When dealing with the education of children, people are naturally reluctant to experiment and understandably so. However, innovation, as Hess points out, is notoriously messy. To be frank, I am not sure what people are so worried about. While many of our school districts are doing fine, there some in such poor shape that they cry our for innovative approaches. It is not as if these schools, should they engage the messiness and dirt of innovation, will be doing any more of a disservice to their students than they already are.

Hess points out, perhaps shockingly so, that some of the "reforms" now being pursued are at best a fair first step. The opening move in a larger chess game of improving schools on a real and fundamental level. The accountability provisions of NCLB, for example, while a move in the right direction, but notes that such accountability reformers (including me to a certain extent)

reflexively embrace simple-minded schemes that focus on snapshots of student achievement—such as those required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)—rather than angling toward the kind of performance-oriented metrics that characterize the best public and private organizations. The differences are real, and significant.

NCLB evaluates schools almost exclusively upon once-a-year measures of student performance in math and reading—and requires that schools either pass or fail based on whether a particular percentage of children in a variety of subgroups performs at a state-determined level (see Question & Answer, page 73). There is no attention paid to how much students actually learned that year or to whether schools missed their targets by a lot or a little. It’s as if researchers evaluated hospitals in Boston and Baghdad based simply on the number of patients that died each month, without regard to circumstances. This is not a formula for stable or effective accountability; indeed, it gives a pass to employees in comfortable situations while alienating those operating in the most challenging circumstances.

While the disaggregation of results data may be the best lasting legacy of NCLB, it cannot be the end game. Another target of Hess' criticism is school choice:

By itself, more school choice—whether through school vouchers (which allow public school students to move to private schools), charters, tax credits for private schools, or more modest arrangements—is a fine idea in its own right, but one that does not yield the deregulation or results that most casual supporters have in mind. Severe government-imposed impediments, such as regulations on curriculum, operations, and teacher compensation, typically remain in place for the schools that liberated students choose under charter or “public school choice” arrangements. Meanwhile, private schools participating in choice arrangements are hampered by the paltry funding of most vouchers, a lack of entrepreneurial energy or promising new ventures, and the ever-present threat of expanded government interference.

Consumers in Moscow in 1975 could choose among scores of grocery stores, but few would argue that this choice yielded a vibrant marketplace. You need to couple choice with opportunities for entrepreneurs to enter the field, obtain resources, recruit talent, compete fairly, and benefit from success.

Both France and the United States have choice-driven market economies, but they vary enormously in entrepreneurial activity. The reason is not consumer choice but dynamic markets, sensible regulation, and aggressive management.

Choice-based arrangements may be a valuable first step to breaking up a lethargic educational monopoly—but only a first step.

I don't think school choice is going away. The charter school movement carries significant momentum and more and more districts are starting to feel the pressure to permit charter schools to address specific needs. But Hess seems to be pointing to the need to take the next step and really let the entrepenurial juices flow. We should allow educational entrepneurs the freedom (and as Hess pointed) the needed funds to experiment. Truthfully, we may have to experiment for years to find a way that works, but the charter schools have been doing that for nearly two decades and have provided a solid base of data for what works and what doesn't. There is a need to find out not only what works, but why.

This is where business can really help. Business organziations have the tools, the expertise and the experience to really help educational entrepenuers, whether public or private, truly and honestly evaluate their "products and services." As schools grasp new ideas, they will need help to understand not only what happened but why as well.

Hess' central message, that real innovation is needed and that innovation is going to be messy no matter how good our intentions may be is difficult to accept. But so far we seem to be tinkering around the edges a great deal. The time appears to be now to jump head first into the pool and see who sinks and who swims. Right now, too many of our kids are sinking and the adults aren't throwing them a life ring.